I used an NBC News video for NASA, NBC News, and WESH look back at 2025 and ahead to 2026 in space. Same people and updated.

✖ Read 45 min. per day.
✔ Drink something while reading. (Coffee.)
✔ Log reading/thoughts on DW.
✖ Read an owned, unread book. (Owned, but rereading.)

It's been nice having a few days off work for the holidays. Being a lump around the house and having enough bandwidth to get some chores done has been a relief.

Current reading: "A Tempest of Tea", by Hasfah Faizal
Minutes read: 32
Pages read: 15
Progress: 10.9% (Of rereading the end of the book.)

( Read more... )

This week's Book Blogger Hop question is Which genre are you eager to jump into more this year, and what draws you to it? and for me, it's more about finding my way back to old favourites, rather than something new

I want to read more horror and science fiction

As a teen and into my early adulthood, horror was everything to me. I grew up on Anne Rice and Stephen King — the lush, gothic obsession of Rice, the slow-creeping dread and very human horror of King

Sci‑fi has always pulled me in with scale.

I love big ideas and big worlds, but especially what it feels like to live inside them - the people, the found families, the hope that keeps flickering even when things are strange or frightening. I enjoy hard sci‑fi just as much as space opera, and I’ve always had a soft spot for stories that take the science seriously without losing their sense of wonder.

I've dipped a toe back in recently and really enjoyed Andy Weir, which reminded me how much I love this genre when it’s grounded and curious. And sitting patiently (or maybe not so patiently) on my TBR are Becky Chambers and Martha Wells, both of whom feel like exactly the kind of character‑driven sci‑fi I’m craving right now.

A lot of this love was shaped by what I watched as much as what I read. Stargate, Star Trek, and Doctor Who all taught me to associate science fiction with optimism, connection, and possibility.

Horror is a slightly different pull.

I grew up on Anne Rice and Stephen King, and I think that shaped my tastes more than I realised. What stayed with me wasn’t just fear, but atmosphere - stories that linger, that sit heavy in the chest, that care about obsession, grief, belief, and the slow creep of dread rather than constant shocks.

That’s probably still what I want now. Horror that unsettles instead of overwhelms, that lets emotion and character do as much work as the scares. I don’t yet know what that looks like in contemporary horror, and that uncertainty is part of the appeal. I've been really enjoying Mira Grant and T Kingfisher recently.

But I'm excited to start exploring both genres again and see what kind of stories are waiting for me!

Thank you to jacieleigh, stellamira and spikedluv for the Christmas cards. While my decorations are down now I've left up the cards, so I can enjoy the cheerful greetings for a bit longer.

As I said, all decorations are down and apart from one crate, put away. Though I did find a springy legged gonk propped up in the corner of the living room this morning. This year, we also bought two succulents in plant pots in the shape of dinosaurs wearing jaunty Santa hats, and those were deliberately left on the kitchen windowsill as I doubt the plants would like being stored for a year. I'm going to see if the hats will come off easily, if not, I don't mind seeing santa!dinos all year.

While the boxes were out of the huge hall cupboard I took advantage of space and had a good declutter in there. That resulted in six binbags of stuff to donate and stuff that needed throwing away, including a load of extra packaging from Christmas. We do have a tip slot booked for midday for today, and were all ready to go, but it's snowing really heavily just now. And while I don't mind walking in it to the car and at the tip, it's the driving that's making me wonder if we should postpone. Oh well, there's a couple of hours to our spot, it may stop before then.

Yuletide authors were revealed and I can now rec in you I have absolute faith a Magnificent Seven film fic by sperrywink. I really enjoyed reading this, and helped bounce some ideas at the start, so yeah, if you like h/c go read, it's good stuff.

Doing that bouncing of ideas also reminded me how much I enjoy thinking about writing, and that along with some really nice comments I've been getting on my bandom stuff makes me a little sad that I haven't written for so long. I have to wonder if I've been recced somewhere for my bandom stories as I have had so many, and on longer stories, too. Lately I've reread due to answering comments, Tints verse, Mr Bob, Sing the Revolution and Painted Ponies, and you know, I still like my own writing.

When I went to bed last night I looked outside and saw a package sitting on the corner of the bin. The package hadn't been there earlier and as the bin is against the fence, the delivery driver had obviously just dropped it over, without knocking or any email to say it had been delivered. Which meant I had to go back out and retrieve it, and I'm glad I did as it was a customised water bottle I'd bought for one of James' Christmas presents. I'd got his pyrography name and logo printed onto the bottle, and I would have hated if someone had reached over and taken it, especially as the delivery was already weeks late.

Heated Rivalry starts here very soon and seeing how many people are talking about it, I'm very eager to watch. It sounds like it could be something I really enjoy. Between that and The Pitt season two, bring on the new shows!

It's Saturday and I'm going to do my best to do nothing today. Just sit here like a lump and consider the merits of becoming one with our purple couches.

One year later, I still freaking love the furniture we I picked out. They're super comfy and a little bit off beat and faintly goth. Perfect for me.



They're holding up really well, despite. our fat asses.

I am still sick. Still coughing and sneezing and everything is much more congested sounding. I have snot in my throat and I do not like it.

Yesterday I survived work! I was doing a lot of outbound calls, so I was able to take a few minutes between and kind of baby my voice. There were two cardiac CTAs and two Cardiac MRIs that needed to be filled, which I did handily, and sent out an email saying that all four had been filled. The head of Radiology thanked me and said that I was fast, and the head of our dept replied that they called me the queen of the Cardiacs. The head of rad immediately took my profile pic and photoshopped a crown onto it and said "lets make it official." I replied with the princess diaries gif, of Anne Hathaway doing the princess wave. I might be reading into it, but I'm wondering if my managers are starting to wear her down for a new position just for me. Time will tell!

The rest of the day I sat and coughed and we watched Bake Off. Today, maybe more Bake Off. We're about halfway through episode 3 of the most recent season.

For now, though, I've got two glorious days to rest and recover, and hopefully kick this bug. Jess has seen stuff on the internet that says it can go up to 8-12 days, which is annoying. I'm hoping not, though. Jess is also still sick, as is my sister, who is probably on day 6 of the bug. Jess and I are neophytes on day 4, so we might have a bit to go.

I should be waking up in Philly today, but alas. It was definitely the right call to cancel, but I'm still sad. We'll have to figure out another time that we can go visit.

Okay, time for me to commence becoming one with the couch. Everyone have an outstannding Saturday!

Snowflake 2026
Challenge #1

The Icebreaker Challenge: Introduce yourself. Tell us why you're doing the challenge, and what you hope to gain from it.

Post your answer to today’s challenge in your own space and leave a comment in this post saying you did it.

Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so. Also, feel free to entice engagement by giving us a preview of what your post covers.

*I know some people do Snowflake differently, and aren't looking for engagement (and that's totally valid), so reacquainting yourself and stating your intentions with your pre-established circle works for this challenge too. ❤️

And please do check out the comments for all the awesome participants of the challenge and visit their journals/challenge responses to comment on their posts and cheer them on.

And just as a reminder: this is a low pressure, fun challenge. If you aren't comfortable doing a particular challenge, then don't. We aren't keeping track of who does what.


Participating in the Snowflake Challenge allows me to start off in the new year in a way that would give me opportunities to interact with various other fans.

There’s a type of person who thinks they never need to question what they’ve already decided the truth is. I wrote the Pure as a hypothetical of what would happen if that type fought reality and won, so thoroughly remaking their section of the universe that unwanted concepts like homosexuality can’t exist there. This book presents Terolan as that type, fighting reality and refusing to recognize just how badly he’s losing. The scientific arm of the labor camp seems to be built entirely around finding ways to reassure Terolan he’s winning, because he’ll kill you if you say otherwise.

My family had our Christmas get-together a week later than planned today. Mom and I went over to my sister and brother-in-law's house, where we watched the highlights of Mamdani's inauguration (first time I've actually seen him speak, and he's certainly good at it), ate some good chicken, mashed potatoes, and mac and cheese, and then opened presents. Lots of practical ones, especially for my sister, who needed a lot of various articles of clothing, and I now have a working table lamp in a spot where I really needed one. Also, of course, books. Mom got me a few Mary Beards, and I also got the third volume of The Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation. (Just in time, too, since I've started the final ten episodes of The Untamed.)
The tree will stay up another week; mom wanted to keep it until at least twelfth night. Then we are left to try to cope with 2026 as best we can. I've got a plan or two towards that end, though how they will unfold, it is currently difficult to know.

Just a brief note considering the imminent LJ collapse/shut down, I've been using a tool called LJArchive to make back-ups of my LJ whenever a scare happens. This recent fork by sharpden (Release 0.9.10) should be able to quickly archive all your posts INCLUDING the comments! It won't save the usericons but it will save any images people post in the comments or anything like that, so it's not perfect but it works! You can also use it to back up communities as well, which I highly recommend doing. It doesn't take very long and it's better to be safe than sorry with this at the moment.

Challenge #1

The Icebreaker Challenge: Introduce yourself. Tell us why you're doing the challenge, and what you hope to gain from it.


I'm a writer mostly, who is FINALLY getting around to trying to market my existing work. I'm super into gardening and preserving food. I'm also really interested in trying to close the circle of production and consumption. Instead of paying a lot of money for stuff and creating a lot of trash, I love things like composting, which takes the trash and turns it into something useful, which makes rich soil that can be used to grow food and cut down on my grocery bill.

The dream before I got to actually put some of these theories into practice was total self-sufficiency, but it turns out that's MUCH harder than it sounds. Still, being able to close that circle to any degree is fun and satisfying, and that's what I'm really into exploring these days, as well as going back to basics wherever it's feasible. There are modern conveniences that make life sooo much easier, but there are others that just seem to complicate things. I'm interested in finding and utilizing the old-school methods that make sense and don't take up too much time and energy, because they also tend to be a lot cheaper and more friendly to the environment. I write about this kind of thing a lot! And I play with it in reality a lot, too.

I was so disappointed this year with anime specifically, and tv in general, that I felt like maybe I shouldn't even participate in Snowflake this year because I have so little good to say about fandom-related things! We've mostly resorted to rewatching old favorites since we could hardly find anything new to enjoy. Then I realized, maybe I can use Snowflake to solicit recommendations from other participants! So please, pleeeease, give me your recs!! If the show/movie is old, that's great, too. Tell me your all-time favorites!

But also, I want to get back into blogging more generally! I did some in the middle of last year, then life went completely off the rails. I've been dipping my toe here and there lately on DreamWidth, then I realized Snowflake was about to return, and I thought that would be the perfect opportunity to get back into it!

I was going to go with competitive bands for Welcome to 2026 with popular bands at the Rose Parade! Instead I went by views on videos.

about my 2025 books:

i read 323 books this year, 11 more than last: 280 fiction & 43 nonfiction

55 of the 280 fiction books were novellas or short stories

female / other gender authors:



most books read by a single author:



any translated books?



longest title:



shortest title:



1st book read in 2025:



last book read in 2025:



1st book finished in 2026:

---

( 3-star books - 2025 - fiction )

⭕️⭕️⭕️

( 3-star books - 2025 - nonfiction )

---

previous reading memes: 2024 | 2023 | 2022 | 2021 | 2020 | 2019 | 2018

I realized the reason I’m reluctant to have conversations while my brother is around. No matter what I say, I’m afraid his reply will make me feel like my statement was stupid and I shouldn’t have opened my mouth. It never feels like he’s distorting my statement or even being particularly rude; it just feels like he made an accurate observation that somehow undercut me. But he’s the only person I’ve ever talked to who can consistently do this to me, so I’m clearly not the important factor here.

My mother once told me my brother is sad he can’t reconcile with me. I don’t really give a shit.

I read that post that says Hallmark Christmas movies are like that because they make depressed Christian housewives feel better about their life choices. Anyone have an explanation for why the romance subplot in every modern trad-published fantasy novel is like that? Why does every heroine who thinks of herself as strong and independent need a seemingly cruel but secretly kind dom who makes her feel happy to be submissive? Do Christian housewives read fantasy novels? Do their husbands know about this forbidden Satanic literature?

Oh, crap. There's huge pokethrough on the sleeves. OK, redo it.

Just love that I apparently am going blind.

So apparently there's a chance that the English-speaking part of LiveJournal will shut down soon.

Wtf!

IG I'll need to archive some of my favourite webpages T_T

 

Also Happy New Year bitches!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!